For the past 15 or so years, Nathan Fielder has had one of the most captivating trajectories in comedy. From deadpan stints on This Hour Has 22 Minutes to crossing the 49th parallel for his endearingly awkward Comedy Central series Nathan for You to directing and starring the transcendent Paramount+ series The Curse, Fielder has built a cult following that has permeated the mainstream with tongue-in-cheek antics and a cornucopia of weirdo shit. Season 2 of The Rehearsal, the newest chapter in that self-constructed canon, Fielder no longer lends his services to help small businesses grow, nor is he preparing people for life's uncertain moments. Instead, he's revolutionizing airline safety, and he's doing it well.
Building off of its first season — and seemingly everything in Fielder's life that came before it — The Rehearsal returns with the Fielder method having been established and Nate's Lizard Lounge shipped once again across state lines. For this new series of rehearsals, he goes off with HBO's blank cheque and builds an uncanny replica of a terminal in the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, TX.
According to his own research of airplane disasters (something he claims as a hobby), Fielder surmises that, historically, the leading cause of airplane incidents is a lack of communication between pilots and first officers — cutbacks on DEI programs, shoddy construction and understaffed air control towers are another issue.
Like the first season, Fielder serves as a producer playing God with a laptop strapped to his chest, orchestrating a world inhabited by unsuspecting hopefuls, willing participants and actors. One participant calls Fielder a liar like Willy Wonka. But Fielder uses Season 2's real-life subjects less as direct jokes than before, presenting them even more candidly than ever; a lot of them are just trying to keep their jobs.
But The Rehearsal isn't truly about them — those people willing to find the best possible way to face life's uncertainties by some of the strangest means necessary. It was, and still is, an extension of Fielder's own persona: a man determined to understand human behaviour while yearning for connection. Those aspects of his character have already undergone self-surgery, like in Nathan for You's feature-length finale "Finding Frances" or the final, self-reflexive episode of The Rehearsal's first season. But Season 2 of The Rehearsal offers a deeper, more invasive operation.
The Rehearsal delivers a "docuseries" that flits between abject artificiality and questionable reality with a simple, almost invisible grace. It's a world created on a soundstage, in Fielder's own image, presented as forwardly as possible. The absence of any overt style makes its many singular, sometimes fucked, images hit exponentially harder. This is a series that captures Fielder pretending to eat a child's faeces (which is Satanic) with the same dry lens as someone grappling with the reality of their own shortcomings. Everything, whether real or not, is presented on the same, seemingly sincere, plane.
With Season 2, Fielder again becomes part pilot and part magician, steering the series wherever it needs to go while never truly revealing any of his secrets. He deals with life-or-death stakes, looking at issues — and himself — more closely than before, expanding the horizons of comedic television far beyond anything else right now.
The Rehearsal is no longer just a rehearsal. It's an observation, an investigation, a performance and an experience.